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Tag: hitchcock

Martin Scorsese: The Persisting Vision

The August issue of New York Review of Books has a wonderful essay by Martin Scorsese on the history and language of film, Vertigo, and cinema as a great American art form:

As in the case of many great films, maybe all of them, we don’t keep going back for the plot. Vertigo is a matter of mood as much as it’s a matter of storytelling—the special mood of San Francisco where the past is eerily alive and around you at all times, the mist in the air from the Pacific that refracts the light, the unease of the hero played by James Stewart, Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score. As the film critic B. Kite wrote, you haven’t really seen Vertigo until you’ve seen it again. For those of you who haven’t seen it even once, when you do, you’ll know what I mean.

Every decade, the British film magazine Sight and Sound conducts a poll of critics and filmmakers from around the world and asks them to list what they think are the ten greatest films of all time. Then they tally the results and publish them. In 1952, number one was Vittorio de Sica’s great Italian Neorealist picture Bicycle Thieves. Ten years later, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was at the top of the list. It stayed there for the next forty years. Last year, it was displaced by a movie that came and went in 1958, and that came very, very close to being lost to us forever:Vertigo. And by the way, so did Citizen Kane—the original negative was burned in a fire in the mid-1970s in Los Angeles.

So not only do we have to preserve everything, but most importantly, we can’t afford to let ourselves be guided by contemporary cultural standards—particularly now…We have to remember: we may think we know what’s going to last and what isn’t. We may feel absolutely sure of ourselves, but we really don’t know, we can’t know. We have to remember Vertigo…

(New York Review of Books)

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Midweek Miscellany

Psycho-Drama — Pat Kirkham reassesses the collaboration between Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock for Design Observer:

The entire Bass/Hitchcock collaboration deserves to be better known, partly because of the sheer quality of the work, partly because it offers an interesting case study of the complex interchange between film and design, and partly because of the controversy surrounding Bass’s contribution to what is arguably the most famous scene in U.S. cinema — the shower scene in Psycho. Serious discussion of Bass’s contribution to the shower scene — a fascinating collaboration, from novel and script to musical score — remains problematic, not least because issues of authorship are far from dead in many academic disciplines, design history and film studies included.

Portmanteau — William Gibson’s new collection of non-fiction, Distrust That Particular Flavorreviewed in The New York Times:

Everything he notices seems to be a this grafted onto a that. In these essays, we see a man fascinated by objects and places containing their own contradictions. It makes sense, then, that Gibson’s novels have helped promote several portmanteau words and neologisms, like “cyberspace,” into widespread English use. This is the essence of Gibson-think — anything can be a kind of portmanteau, a glued-­together paradox.

See also: Gibson interviewed in The National Post (who get bonus points for their “Neuromantic” headline) and The Globe and Mail.

And finally…

What You Want, But Not What You Need — An interesting article by Ian Leslie, author of Born Liars, on serendipity:

[T]here is a reason why Amazon is successful and bookshops are closing: in a world of infinite choice, efficiency is hard to resist. The pleasures of the bookshop or the library are easily outgunned by the knowledge that we can order or download a book instantly, or find the information we’re looking for within seconds. Serendipity, on the other hand, is, as Zuckerman says,  “necessarily inefficient”. It is a fragile quality, vulnerable to our desire for convenience and speed. It also requires a kind of planned vagueness. Digital systems don’t do vagueness very well, and our patience with it seems to be fading.

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The Ultimate Hitchcock Cookbook

Hitch is an animated homage to Alfred Hitchcock by Felix Meyer, Pascal Monaco, and Torsten Strer, students at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover:

(via Quipsologies)

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Les Diaboliques | A. O. Scott

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott turns his attention to the 1955 French thriller Les Diaboliques directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot:

Les Diaboliques was based on the novel Celle qui n’était plus (She Who Was No More) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac and before Clouzot bought the rights to the screenplay, Alfred Hitchcock was apparently about to do so. Coincidently, Robert Bloch, author of Pyscho, was a fan of Clouzot’s movie.

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Hitchcock and the History of Movie Trailers

If you are still stewing over last night’s lacklustre Oscars (or even if your not), take a listen to Terry O’Reilly’s entertaining history of movie trailers for The Age of Persuasion. He kicks it off with this genius trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:

And, for it’s worth, movie trailers were originally created to get people OUT of theatres, not into them. Brilliant.

Listen to The Age of Persuasion podcast:

CBC RADIO: AOP GOES TO THE MOVIES

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Midweek Miscellany

Eye, Eye! — The Creative Review looks at the vibrant work of printing studio/small press Nobrow.

It’s an Anagram! — Indigo’s e-book initiative Shortcovers has become ‘Kobo’. Much fuss has been made about the name (and the slightly iffy redesign), but what’s more interesting is that Kobo is being spun-off from its parent company in an attempt to expand its global reach… The intrepid Mark Bertils and PW have more on the international angle; Wired think Amazon should be worried; and The National Post have a good Q&A with Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis…

Collector’s Items — Vote for your favourite Nabokov cover from John Gall‘s set of individually commissioned redesigns for Vintage.

The Decade of Dirty DesignSteven Heller, author of Handwritten and New Vintage Type (to name just a couple) on the “anti-digital” Oughts (via Charles Brock):

With the increase of the D.I.Y. sensibility, with renewed emphasis on “making things from scratch,” designers were feeling a need to make physical (not virtual) contact with their materials and outcomes…

[Perhaps less “anti-digital” than “post-digital“? Any thoughts designers?]

And finally…

ryan-tym

The Hitchcock Collection — a self-initiated project by London-based graphic designer Ryan Tym (via FormFiftyFive):

After recently purchasing a badly designed Alfred Hitchcock
DVD box set, I set to work on creating my own collection of
original covers. Each design features an iconic image related
to the film it represents and includes a bold typographic
title.

I would love to see Ryan design some book covers… Wouldn’t you?

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